Creating stylish kitchen scene in Blender - Tip of the Week

One of our recent collection for Blender - Archinteiors vol. 58 for Blender consists of ten interior scenes - mostly kitchens with full equipment and appliances.

Let's look how scene number 3 looks like.

This is a final image straight from render frame, there is no external post-production, we made just a slight tweaks.

We used Filmic mode for better tonality and we slightly adjusted white balance curve to take down some yellow tones. Except these two tweaks, we didn't use any compositing in Blender.

This image was rendered with 2048 samples and denoised with Intel Open Image denoiser. The render took 6 minutes and 32 seconds with Geforce 2080 Ti in Optix mode.

You can set up GPU rendering in Preferences > System tab. From my expeiriences , rendering with GPU only is no longer than using GPU and CPU, so I have selected only my graphics card as an Optix render device.

This is a view of the scene with material override. 

You can setup material override by creating new material in Blender and assigning it as material override in Scene tab.

Overview of the scene - there are a few window openings on the left of a camera. The windows on the back are mostly covered by emission planes and act as rectangular light sources.

Interior is mostly designed for a camera angle.

Camera settings

Interior from another angle. This scene is highly optimized. It loads in seconds and there is a fluid FPS during navigation, even in Material view.

Behind the camera we placed a plane with emission material to make the scene brighter.

These are all lights that are in the scene, except environment emission planes.

Environment plane is a rectangular light with a mapped landscape.

For the last two years, when PBR standard came to life, materials are much simplier than before. In this case we have just four textures (diffuse, specular, roughness, normal) plugged into BSDF shader and some tweaking nodes that control the amount of each texture.

The material settings above was for these meshes.

Tiled furnace close-up. Tiles are separate meshes.

Gas stove mesh.

We checked the performance of Blender Cycles in Blender 3.0. Project "Cycles X" promises a vas improvement in render times. But, as for now (december 2021) it looks like Blender 2.93 is faster than 3.0. 

This image is rendered in Blender 3.0 with Geforce 2080 Ti and it took 7 minutes and one second to complete with 2048 samples. It was denoised with Open Image Denoiser.

Almost identical result and the same parameters (2048 samples) but in Blender 2.93 took 6 minutes and 32 seconds.

In some scenes Blender 3.0 promises really nice improvements which we tested in this video:

and we believe that this will be true for more scenes, (including these interior) over time.